Friday 8 November 2013

Objects, they kind of suck.

I had a bit of a poke around the dusk code today, looking into the embedded db option.

It's not going to be as easy as I thought ... oh well.

The main trouble is that the objects used in the game are usually copies of some prototype object. So most of the data is copied but read-only - i.e. the sort of stuff that when you put it into a database you separate into a separate shared table. For Actives, I might be able to move this type of stuff into Races.

Another related issue is that the object heirarchy - whilst accurately representing every behaviour wanted in the game - is just a bit hassle for me to have to duplicate again to fix the database tables. I might simplify it.

It might even make sense to drop the common base class for everthing. One motivation for that was to save on (the considerable) i/o code, but all that can go away now. Another motivation was a single hash table for all live objects; but usually the code is only interested in a sub-set of classes anyway, and if it is backed by a database having seperate tables is more flexible.

I guess I still need to sit on this a bit more becaausei'm trying to be lazy and get away with a small amount of effort.

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